“Come on, I need to see the angle so I can figure out where the camera would be.”
Joe straddled Marla as Tatiyana had straddled blondie and he looked back over his left shoulder. It didn’t take more than thirty seconds to find where the camera had been. There was a television in the upper right hand corner of the room held in place by a metal bracket. Just beneath the bracket was a fresh patch of joint compound about three inches in diameter. The camera had been removed. This wasn’t a good sign. People were covering their tracks.
Truthfully, Joe had very little to go on besides the DVD, a wall patch, and his suspicions. Neither the wall patch nor the DVD proved a thing by themselves. With Frank still unconscious, Joe couldn’t even prove blackmail. As things stood now, the only thing Joe had viable proof of was that Frank had cheated on Tina with at least two women and that he might even have enjoyed having it filmed.
“Let’s go,” he said to Marla.
Joe put his hand on the door paddle, but he heard the sound of clickety-clackety heels coming their way.
“It’s the desk clerk,” Marla whispered, peering through a slit in the brown and orange drapes.
Joe turned to Marla, his index finger across his lips.
The heels stopped right outside their door. “Vere are you, you fat bitch? Maria, vena ca! ” She pounded on the door of 217. Stopped. Pounded again. Stopped. She stepped to the right, pounded on the door of 218. “Maria! Maria!”
Joe looked over at Marla, saw her shaking. Caught her eye and mouthed, “We will be okay.” She smiled. Her smile convinced no one, least of all herself.
Maria wasn’t answering the door at 218. Now they heard the jingle of keys and the heels moving back to their door. A key slid in the lock, turned, the paddle pushed down…
“Lo siento, lo siento, Ilana,” Maria was breathless in her apology and began reeling off rapid fire Spanish.
Joe caught the word bano, Spanish for bathroom, several times.
Though it was nearly impossible to understand Ilana’s perversion of Russian and Spanish, it was pretty obvious she wasn’t pleased with Maria.
Joe gave Marla the thumbs up and waved his palms at her to stay calm. The wheels of the cleaning cart squealed as Maria pushed it away. Ilana’s heels smacked the pavement, moving off in the opposite direction.
Letting another minute pass, they stepped out into what was turning into a sunny, if chilly, March morning. Neither the chambermaid nor the desk clerk were anywhere in sight. They walked back to their original room quickly, but not at a run. Marla was still shaking when they closed the door behind them.
Detective Jones opened his mouth to speak, but his partner, Detective O’Brien, put up his palms, then pointed straight up at the underbelly of the United 747 passing over head. They had quickly grown weary of screaming above the noise and then having to repeat themselves anyway once the jets passed.
“I wanna show you something,” Jones said, his hair blowing in the jets backwash. “Over here.”
They ducked under the tape back to where the dead girl’s body waited to be bagged.
“What, you notice something?” O’Brien asked.
“Yeah.” They knelt down over the corpse. “Let’s roll her over. Ready? One. Two. Three. See that tattoo?”
“Yeah, and so.”
“She was probably Russian. Maybe a pro or at least into S amp;M.”
“Who are you, Sherlock fuckin’ Holmes?”
“The tattoo means slave in Russian.”
“And a schmuck from the Bronx knows this how?”
“Spent four years in the bag in the Six-One Precinct.”
“Brighton Beach. Russia in Brooklyn.”
“Correct. Now let’s get outta here. These jets are giving me a fucking headache.”
As they rode back to Marla’s apartment, Joe tried waiting her out. Silent and ashen, she seemed completely spooked by what had gone on back at the Blue Fountain. Serpe could have kicked himself. He had let the job ruin his marriage. Now his single-mindedness about Frank and Cain had let him get someone involved in things she had no business being mixed up in. He resolved not to let her get in any deeper and was about to say so.
“How did you do it, Joe? All those years on the street, how could you not be scared?”
“Only idiots and the dead aren’t scared. I was scared all the time. The trick is not showing it. If the trick was not being scared, no one would ever step outside their house.”
“How do you learn not to act frightened?”
“You just do, but you don’t have to worry about it. You’re out of it now,” he said.
“Where are we going, Joe? My apartment’s that way.”
“We’re going to rent a car. You need to have your life back.”
“I don’t want it back, not the way it used to be.”
“Take it back, just for a few days. For me.”
Three weeks ago it took Bob Healy several minutes to recognize Joe Serpe. Now all he could do was worry about the guy. He couldn’t seem to get a hold of him and couldn’t believe Joe hadn’t somehow heard about last night. Healy resolved to try both of Serpe’s numbers one last time and to keep himself occupied until he finally heard back from the man. He looked around and decided George was right about a lot of things. The house was a complete mess. Healy picked up the police report logs and began thumbing through them.
He didn’t like having Marla use her credit card to rent the car for him, but he had little choice. Plastic is a luxury men with bad credit histories can’t afford. The divorce and the legal fees from his troubles had ruined Joe financially. He was better now, having been named Vinny’s sole beneficiary and working a job that paid him a nice chunk of change in cash, but until Marla he hadn’t felt the need to reestablish himself.
The plan was to drive back to his apartment, shower, and try to set up a meeting with Tina. Those plans changed as he tried pushing back the front door. It stuck and then moved back, but not as easily as it should have.
Mulligan was dead. Some sick fuck had slit the cat open down the middle and turned him inside out, leaving him just inside the door so there was no chance Serpe would miss him. On the wall, in the cat’s blood, were written the words: “LEAVE IT ALONE” and a phone number, Marla’s phone number. Nothing else in the apartment was disturbed.
He fought back his tears, dialing Marla’s number frantically. He became almost sick at the thought of not getting through to her.
“Hello,” she said.
“It’s me.”
“What’s the matter? Your voice is-”
“Get out of your apartment. Stay with family and make sure you’re not alone at night.”
“Joe, what-”
“Do it now!” he screamed at her. “Just fucking do it and don’t argue. Keep your cell on you and call me when you settle on a place.”
He slammed the phone down. Joe got a bag and wrapped Mulligan in it. He borrowed a pick and shovel from his landlord’s shed and dug a grave. After tamping down the frozen dirt over the last remnant of his old life, he knelt by the grave and let out years of uncried tears. Just as Cain’s death had let him live again, it had taken the slaughter of an old tomcat to make him realize just how much he had lost.
It was only when he came out of the shower that he noticed the messages.
Using location, time frame, and paint color, Healy had narrowed it down to three possibilities. Two, really. Of course there was a chance that none of these vehicles were responsible for the damage to Serpe’s car or for the streaks of black paint left behind. There was a good chance that the car or truck had just taken off, never to be seen again.
The least likely candidate was the 2002 black Corvette stopped for excessive speed in bad weather conditions. The time was right: about 1:45 pm. The location was right: between exits 72 and 71 on the westbound L.I.E., but there was no notation about damage on the car.
The other two candidates seemed far more promising. About ten minutes after he stopped the Corvette, the same cop approached a 2004 black Lincoln Navigator that was pulled to the far right shoulder of the westbound
